I interviewed Joe at Summit Camp last July, on top of the Greenland ice sheet. We stood right next to an ice core bore hole that produced an important core in 1993. The Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two (GISP2) core gives science an ice record back 100,000 years. Joe’s team has done additional, higher resolution cores that go back 500 years to see how changes in pollutants might have affected climate and human health.

Joe’s research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in 2008. Click here to see the paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/105/34/12140.full

A Herc on snow.

But back at Summit Camp; I wanted to videotape a take off, but low on sleep, at 11,000’ in elevation, and with a resting heart rate of 97, I decided I would not try to drag myself outside. Instead, I shot through the window of The Big House, the central hub of activity at Summit Camp. Next day, though, I felt much better and asked to shoot our plane landing on skis. Chris Greenfield, the Summit Camp medic, was much obliged. He packed me and my camera and tripod on the back of a snowmobile and roared out to what we hoped would be close to where the Herc would set down.

Lisa and Chris on a snowmobile.

I had never been on a snow machine before. It was exhilarating to fly across the snow like that. We stopped. I jumped off, set up my tripod and camera, then the Herc landed much further away than we had hoped. Not much of a shot. But then Chris asked if I wanted to ride along side the Herc as it skied in. Sure! I piled back on. It was almost impossible at 45 mph to shoot straight. I was barely hanging on. At one point, my headphones and sunglasses started slipping down my head. One hand on the camera, one hand on the grip handle at my hip, I had to ease them back on with a shrug and a little help from Chris’s back. Again, it wasn’t such a great shot, but the experience was unforgettable. Still, you’ll find a bit of it in this video of the Herc in the snow at Summit Camp.

In ‘Meet the Summit Staff, Part 1‘ we met the Summit Camp manager, medic, heavy equipment operator, and chef. In this second series of videos, meet some of the other staff essential to Summit Camp’s operation.

Meet the Snow Man
Meet Ben Toth, one of the heavy equipment operators up here at Summit Camp. Not much could happen at Summit without Ben and Jake, who groom the skiway and move snow around all day, every day.

Meet the Mechanic
Willow Fitzgerald is Summit’s mechanic. It’s her job to take care of the snowmobiles and large tractors used to groom the skiway and move the snow that would otherwise bury all the buildings. And, most importantly, she maintains the Summit generator, the source of all the power that runs the camp… including the heat needed to melt water and warm the buildings.

Meet the Tech
Steve Munsell is one of the science technicians up at Summit. He makes sure a whole host of science projects– from collecting snow samples for chemistry analysis to balloon launches to measuring snow accumulation– get done.

Meet the Foreman
Geoff Phillips is the construction foreman up at Summit, in charge of all the building maintenance and construction.

In this series of videos, meet some of the hard-working crew we scientists depend upon.

Meet the Boss
The head of a small crew of immensely talented staff, Kathy Young is the Summit Camp Manager.

Meet the Doc
Chris Greenfield, the Summit Camp medic, describes all the different things that can go wrong in such a remote field camp. Luckily, he is there to help out when they do.

Meet the Real Ice Trucker
Meet Jake Speed, one of the heavy equipment operators up here at Summit Camp.

Meet the Chef
Meet Rosemary Garofalo, the incredible cook at Summit Camp, and the key to keeping everyone happy and in good spirits.

No snowmachines or generators usually means a long, slow walk through the snow pulling a sled piled with gear. This year though, thanks to a group of students at the University of Wisconsin who built a zero-emissions electric snowmobile, we were able to ride to and from our site in style.

The weather was great, and with the help of Tony Cummings, a senior at Georgia Tech here at Summit working with the HOx NOx group (a group of scientists studying the influence of sunlight on snow and atmospheric chemistry,) we were able to dig the big pit, and a smaller “lab” pit that we can work in, in a few short hours. I honestly don’t think that Tony knew what he was in store for, but I also think he enjoyed the good, hard work. Digging is very satisfying, and an excellent way to stay warm.

Let the digging begin.

Elyse peering over the top of the lab pit, with our big research pit in front.

The lab pit is to keep the instruments and scientists out of the wind, and to keep the snow samples cold enough that they don’t melt on warm surfaces or start to change their structure. In the big pit, we are looking at a whole host of physical properties, and how these properties change over time.

Equipment in our lab pit. The grey box on the right is what we call our “permeameter”; it measures how easily air can move through snow. In the white box on the left is a thermal conductivity probe: a needle we push into the snow that heats to a certain temperature then provides us with thermal conductivity readings by measuring the time it takes to heat the snow. The blue box beneath the thermal conductivity probe is a stand for short snow/ice core sections. It isolates samples from the wind– an element that can easily disturb and affect the thermal conductivity measurements.

I had also dug pits here (dragging my gear out in a sled by foot) in the previous two years, and now I can trace the changes in the snow in the intervening time. Last year and the year before, I had put bamboo poles in the snow and tied a brightly colored string across the snow surface. I was able to find both of the strings in the pit, buried by the snow from this year and last. I was relieved and slightly surprised when they both popped up as we were digging.

Kristina stands on one of the pit steps while Maria takes density measurements inside. To take these measurements, we use a tool that cuts out 100 cubic centimeter blocks of snow, then measure the mass of these blocks.

Camp manager Kathy Young and science tech Steve Munsell stopped by our site on the way back to camp after a two hour ski. It was fun to have visitors.

We ended up having to go back out to our site after dinner when things had cooled down a bit. Earlier in the day, we had tried to hand drill a few short cores, but the cores kept getting stuck in the barrel, which was being warmed alarmingly by the sun. Coming out “at night” (it’s 24 hour daylight here now) means colder temperatures, and easier working conditions. Chris, the camp medic, apparently felt sorry for us, and brought out a much needed thermos of cocoa and some after-dinner mints. And then got roped into helping us cover up our pits. A great end to a great day.

Our team: (from left) me, Elyse (Hamilton), Kristina (Bowdoin), Maria (Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany), and Tom (University of Vermont.)

Before Tom left, we took a team photo in front of our office space, The Tomato (or Apple, or Space Station….we haven’t quite decided on a name yet. Any suggestions?) Our office space is a bubble-like fiberglass shelter on skis that can be moved around camp and used for various purposes. Right now, we get to use it for office space, using our computers and the wireless internet (!) that is in almost all of the buildings at camp.

The team showing off the back of our ’snow freak’ t-shirts in front of our mobile office.

Watching the LC-130 ski-equipped Hercules (Herc) aircraft land at Summit is always an event. It’s just such a surreal site watching this large plane land on a snow runway (the skyway). The skyway is constantly maintained by the staff up at Summit, and makes a nice, smooth place to ski. It’s almost totally flat up here, with no hills, but there are many small-scale bumps in the snow called sastrugi. These are snow dunes that are caused by wind, and do not make for easy skiing.

The Herc heading towards the skyway.

The nose of the Herc. Look closely at the bottom right to see the skis the plane uses to land.

The next flight is not for another few weeks. It is always a little scary to watch a plane take off and know you that you will be staying put for a while with no other way of getting home. But things are going well here, the weather is good, and we are getting all of our equipment ready to start digging our first big pit!

Transporting people and gear to and from the skyway.